Session Information
30 SES 17 A, Symposium: The Use of Theory in Environmental and Sustainability Education Research
Symposium
Contribution
This presentation will discuss trajectories of social and geographic theory that have prompted new angles of ESE research, namely: policy mobilities and network studies, affect theory, and infrastructure studies. Each will be introduced with some of the types of interconnected analyses they have prompted in my, with colleagues, recent empirical research and their potential usefulness for ESE. Policy mobilities theory developed out of geography during the 2010’s shaped by the mobility turn in the social sciences. Attention is given to flows and networks of ideas, people, technologies, and how they shape social policy (Peck & Theodore, 2012). It includes consideration of specific locations and their influence on the mobilities of policy, such as local social and political contexts, physical materialities, or other specifics of territory (Robinson, 2015). This has enabled analyses on how ESE policy moves (or not) across intergovernmental, national, and subnational settings, as well on the roles of policy actors and networks in the global mobilities of, for example, ESD, EE, and climate change education. Also drawn from geographical scholarship, as well as anthropology and literary studies, critical materialist theories of affect have been helpful for thinking through drivers of the relative mobilities of ESE policy (e.g. Anderson, 2014). This includes an understanding of affect as socially mediated and circulated, including in relation to other material and nonlinguistic considerations, and as part of what shapes the priorities of policy making on ESE. Finally, infrastructure studies is an interdisciplinary field which considers the social shaping and impact of physical ‘things’ or ‘systems,’ such as school buildings and associated digital, water, waste, and energy infrastructures. As Appel and colleagues (2018) suggest, attention to the materiality of infrastructure indicates how it is central to our ‘sensory, somatic, and affective’ habitation of the world (p. 25). Infrastructures are part of what shapes the mobilities of education policy and also have their own environmental and climate costs (such as the high emissions of the increasing digital platformisation of education governance). These examples will be elaborated to show some ways that researchers can ‘use theory to think with their data (or use data to think with theory)’ (Youngblood Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 2) in generative ways for ESE research, policy, and practice. It suggests that cross-disciplinary reading can be indispensable for making new connections and helping point to critical gaps in current ESE policy making and practice (McKenzie, Lewis, & Gulson, 2021).
References
Appel, H., Anand, N., & Gupta, A. (2018). Introduction: Temporality, politics, and the promise of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The promise of infrastructure. Duke University Press. Anderson, B. (2014). Encountering affect: Capacities, apparatuses, conditions. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. McKenzie, M., Lewis, S., & Gulson, K. (2021). Matters of (im)mobility: beyond fast conceptual and methodological readings in policy sociology, Critical Studies in Education, 62 (3), 394-410. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2021.1942942 Peck, J. & Theodore, N. (2012). Follow the policy: A distended case approach. Environment and Planning A, 44, 21–30. doi:10.1068/a44179. Robinson, J. (2015). ‘Arriving at’ urban policies: The topological spaces of urban policy mobility. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39, 831–834. doi:10.1111/1468- 2427.12255 Youngblood Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. Routledge.
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